Remembrance

by Theresa Breslin

  Francis kissed the top of her head and stepped into the roadway.

  A young man in a private’s uniform was walking slowly down the street towards the shop. ‘He’s rather late for the celebrations,’ said Maggie.

  On seeing her the bog’s step quickened, and she screwed up her eyes to watch him approach. ‘I suppose we could find a bit of cake for him.’

  ‘He looks very weary, as if he’s walked all the way from Edinburgh,’ said Francis.

  Maggie took a step forward and her hand clutched at her throat. ‘Oh my God,’ she said softly.

  Francis turned to look at her stricken face. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s my brother,’ Maggie gasped. ‘It’s my brother Alex.’

  Chapter 42

  MAGGIE’S CRIES COULD be heard several streets away, and her family and neighbours came running at once. The boy Willie, thinking Maggie was being attacked, appeared brandishing a broom bigger than himself.

  Maggie ran to Alex and they hugged each other, she weeping, and he, almost breaking down, caught between laughter and crying. Then he set her aside gently, and pushed his way through the crowd until he found his mother. She clasped her arms around his neck. ‘My son,’ she sobbed, ‘my baby. My son, Alex, my son, my son …’

  Someone ran and fetched a chair so that she could sit down, and then all the neighbours had to shake Alex by the hand. Many were in tears. It took an age before they managed to usher Alex inside.

  Francis quietly took his leave of Maggie and slipped away.

  Eventually Alex was upstairs and seated in his father’s chair by the fireside. Maggie’s father stood with his back to the fire, but every few minutes he walked around the room so that he could ruffle his son’s hair or pat his shoulder.

  Maggie was perched on the arm of the chair, and her mother sat at her son’s feet on a low stool holding his plate with a piece of cake on it. Alex was clumsily trying to manage a cup of tea with a saucer. At intervals his mother took her son’s free hand in her own and stroked it, or lifted it to her lips and pressed it against her cheek.

  ‘I must go and see Mrs Kane and ask her to forgive me for taking Kenneth’s birth certificate,’ Alex said, after a while.

  ‘She was in the street,’ said Maggie. ‘I spoke to her. She is happy to see you home.’

  Alex looked at his parents and at Maggie. ‘I am sorry for the worry I must have caused you all. I can only say that at the time it seemed to me to be the right thing to do, to go and take revenge for my brother.’

  ‘John Malcolm had a peaceful death, son,’ said Maggie’s father. ‘We had word from a soldier who was there when he died.’

  There was a silence, and then Alex said, ‘I saw him, you know. I never told anyone about it, but on the day the War Office telegram arrived here, I saw him out in the back lane. He was smiling at me.’

  A sob came from his mother’s throat, and Alex stretched out and laid his hand on the top of her head.

  ‘I held this idea of vengeance in my heart. And at the beginning that was enough to keep me going, but …’ Alex’s voice slowed. ‘I came to realize that killing can sicken the soul.’

  Maggie nodded. Soldiers she had nursed in France shared this sentiment.

  Alex continued with his story. ‘Then my unit was caught in the German spring breakthrough. I was cut off with another lad …’ Alex hesitated. His last news of Kurt was that he was recovering after having his leg amputated. Alex looked around at the faces of his family. He would wait until their wounds of grief had healed some before telling them the full story of his last days of the War. ‘Eventually I was found by some ANZAC troops,’ he went on, ‘the Australians and New Zealanders. I didn’t recognize their accent and when I saw the New Zealand army hat at first I thought they were Germans. They took me with them, and it was months before I got back down the line.’

  ‘Why didn’t you telegraph when you got back to Britain?’ asked his father.

  ‘I only got back to my base in England yesterday and there they told me that you had been sent word that I was probably dead. The Sergeant reckoned I’d get here as soon as any telegram and gave me leave to go home.’ Alex leaned forward and there were tears in his eyes as he spoke to his mother. ‘I dreamed of it every night, Ma. Every single night I imagined how it would be when I came home.’ He looked around the room. ‘The fire burning in the chimney, you in your chair, Dad standing as he is now in front of the mantelpiece. The table set for tea. I would make up conversations in my head. What you would say, how I would reply. Night after night I did it. It helped to keep me going.’

  Then there were tears, and tears, and more tears, and after a while Alex stretched his legs, winked at Maggie, and said jokingly, ‘If I’d known I was coming home to all this crying, I’d have stayed where I was. I thought there’d be some laughter here. I got plenty of sadness in France.’

  There was a sudden silence and Maggie’s mother turned terrible eyes to Alex, searching her son’s face. ‘Was it the hell that some people say it was?’

  Maggie noticed that her father, standing in front of the fire, had become quite still. And it struck Maggie suddenly what she had been turning over and over in her mind in the last hour. In that it was Alex sitting in front of her, returned from the Great War, assuredly it was … and yet it wasn’t. Her brother had changed in some irrevocable way, although she couldn’t place what was different, his eyes, the lines about his mouth? His way of holding himself had altered; the act of placing his hand on his mother’s head, he comforting her, made Maggie realize that her younger brother was a boy no more.

  ‘Was it very bad, son?’ her father asked gravely.

  Alex hesitated; he caught Maggie’s eye. ‘Not so bad …’ he said lightly, ‘… you know …’

  And between their parents, brother and sister looked at each other, and then looked away.

  ‘It would have been cruel to tell them the full truth. Was it such a terrible lie?’ Maggie asked Francis.

  It was a few weeks later and they were making their way to the official dedication of the village’s War Memorial. Mrs Armstrong-Barnes had donated a piece of land which had been planted with wild flowers and herbs, primroses, violets, and rosemary for remembrance. Even Francis had to agree that this seemed appropriate. The little park would be a place for relatives and friends to come and visit; a focus for remembering the fallen, lying far from home in marked and unmarked graves.

  ‘What is the full truth?’ asked Francis. ‘Inhuman conditions and appalling waste of life? That was certainly the case. But for many it was a glorious death. A noble calling, a man marching away to do his duty to protect his mother, wife, children. That’s what we are bred to do – that is our duty. And there is glamour there too, the allure of the uniform, the camaraderie of men together, and the great good fun it could be in the village billets behind the lines.’

  Maggie caught a glimmer of the torment of this man’s soul, for whom nothing was black and white, only infinite shades of grey. ‘You sound almost as though you enjoyed parts of it.’

  ‘Everyone experienced that at certain times,’ said Francis. ‘The sense of relief when you saw the next set of men coming to take over from you, the great joy of knowing that you had come safely through another tour of duty at the Front. The swelling, overwhelming pride of handing over your position intact, of being able to say that you had held the line in your sector. The latter gave a feeling almost of victory. That is why the French army was bled white at Verdun. Their honour, and the honour of France rested with them. “Ils ne passeront pas!” they cried, day after day … and the Germans never did. So now every Frenchman feels that he fought and won with General Pétain at Verdun.’

  ‘You think these are not genuine feelings?’ said Maggie.

  Francis smiled a weary smile. ‘My point is that they are. And, God help me, I felt them too. There was tremendous exhilaration, a rush of emotions such as I have never known. This liberating feeling when, exhausted, you captur
ed an objective, and ultimately for me the terrible seduction of successful leadership. I commanded men to follow me – and they did. The awful fact of the matter was that Major Grant was right. Despite withering machine-gun fire and with shells dropping among them, I knew that if I turned my head, the ones left alive would be right alongside me.’

  Maggie slipped a hand through his arm. ‘You feel corrupted. You who opposed the War do not want to see any glory in it.’

  ‘You are very astute, Maggie,’ said Francis. He tucked her arm firmly under his own. ‘Do you still have my letters?’

  ‘And all the drawings.’

  ‘If you would lend them back to me I will write an account of what I saw and did. It will serve as some sort of record for the future.’

  They went to meet Charlotte who was standing to one side with a bunch of rosemary in her hand. From where she stood Charlotte could see the river and the bridge where she and John Malcolm had said goodbye those years ago. She was glad that her last image of him was his handsome happy face smiling at her. It was something that she could keep inside to help her through the years ahead. She was glad too that John Malcolm’s name was carved on the town’s War Memorial. Having his name there meant that there was somewhere to visit and lay flowers, a place to remember … to remember every one of them … Annie’s two boys, Rory and Ewan, Helen’s young man, the gardener’s lad, the stable boy, the fifteen men and boys from the village who had joined up on the same day and died together, Eddie Kane and all the others.

  Charlotte raised her head when the minister began to read out the list of names. As he reached the name of John Malcolm Dundas, without letting go of Francis’s arm, Maggie reached out and took Charlotte’s hand.

  Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back

  With dying eyes and lolling heads – those ashen-grey

  Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

  Have you forgotten yet?…

  Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.

  Siegfried Sassoon,

  from ‘Aftermath’ (March 1919)

  REMEMBRANCE

  by

  THERESA BRESLIN

  BOOK NOTES & PHOTOGRAPHS

  www.theresabreslin.co.uk

  twitter: @theresabreslin1

  www.facebook.com/theresabreslinauthor

  Remembrance is a story of two families during the years of World War One.

  It tells of a young woman, Maggie, and the awakening of Maggie’s self-awareness. It is about the idealism of her twin brother John Malcolm, and of her young brother Alex, and the result of this idealism. Equally it is about another family: Francis, complex and sensitive, and his young sister, Charlotte, gently yet resolutely pulling away from her mother’s influence. And it is about how the lives of these two families enfold with each other.

  INTRODUCTION

  by THERESA BRESLIN

  Remembrance of the Great War is locked into emotions and senses; entwined with images and sounds, engendering feelings of helplessness, anger, humility, pride and terrible sadness.

  Like many people, the poetry of World War One had a profound effect on me, especially as I was first introduced to it when I was about the same age as the thousands of young people who left their homes, never to return. It wasn’t only the beauty and the significance of the poets’ words, but reading their life stories that made me realize how incredibly brave they were to speak out.

  I felt a need to write this book, to write a story of youth growing into adulthood during this war. I wanted to explore aspects of conflict and how it changed their lives and characters:

  JOHN MALCOLM: the ordinary soldier who firmly believes he is doing his duty and is prepared to sacrifice his life to protect his family.

  MAGGIE AND CHARLOTTE: young women who went to work in the munitions factories or became nurses – wanting to help the war effort or perhaps looking for adventure, and finding, in some cases, an unexpected opportunity for self-fulfilment.

  FRANCIS: the disillusioned officer, a pacifist, who feels his spirit is being corrupted by contact with militarism.

  ALEX: the underage recruit who lies about his age, desperate for excitement but also determinedly seeking revenge.

  THE FAMILIES AT HOME: how they learned of the progress of the war via newspapers and journals and the contrast with what was revealed in letters received from soldiers fighting on the front line, and how the loss of loved ones affected their lives.

  The publication of Remembrance has been overtaken by world events, with war a reality for a new generation. Perhaps now, in these centenary years, it is even more vital that we do remember.

  RESEARCH

  There is a vast amount of material available to consult on World War One: photographs, film and sound archives, museums and websites, and physical locations. The literature alone has a staggering amount of detail: histories – personal and military, poetry, biographies, articles, letters, and newspaper files. The UK War Memorials are a feature of nearly every town and city.

  My initial background reading concentrated mainly on materials written by those who actually took part in the war, e.g. The War the Infantry Knew by Captain James C. Dunn. I read very many letters written by men in action and support staff, the notebooks of the women who nursed the wounded, and the poems of Owen, Rosenberg, Sassoon and others.

  Researching in Belgium and France gave me a clearer idea of the terrain and the locations for my characters to be involved in key events. Anyone visiting the battlefields will recognize the places mentioned in the book:

  YPRES: where Francis is stationed. Interactive displays in the former Cloth Hall which incorporates the In Flanders Fields Museum.

  TALBOT HOUSE, POPERINGE: the all-ranks club where Alex leaves his note on the (still preserved) message board.

  LOOS: where gas was used in 1915 and Rudyard Kipling’s son went missing, which led to the setting up of the War Graves Commission to ensure, as far as possible, that every soldier is remembered.

  THE SOMME, BEAUMONT-HAMEL: where John Malcolm goes forward with his battalion on July 1st in the 1916 Battle of the Somme. Preserved trenches are under the care of the Canadian Visitor Centre, while nearby the magnificent Thiepval Monument dominates the landscape.

  PASSCHENDAELE: In 1917 Francis is attached to the Canadian division as they advance through the mud to take Crest Farm. The Tyne Cot Cemetery there is so called because of the resemblance of the stone to the cottages on Tyneside, the home of many of the soldiers.

  ALBERT: where Alex is caught up in the final phase and confusion of the war in 1918. Information in the Musée des Abris-Somme 1916 in Albert, and road markers on the road to Bapaume, show how little the front line advanced over many months, despite huge loss of life.

  Although Remembrance is a work of fiction, historical facts have not been altered. To achieve authenticity it was necessary to consult war diaries and regimental histories. Invaluable help was also given by library, museum and archival staff, battlefield guides and those who shared their family memorabilia. Key events from each year of the war are told within the story. Specific sources include the Websites of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the Imperial War Museums, newspapers of the time and specialist magazines.

  An article in The War Illustrated contained information about the wartime progress in medicine, vis. the use of new antiseptics and the treatment of typhoid and tetanus. Information gleaned from this gave the substance for a conversation between two of the main characters, Francis and Maggie, which leads to them discussing the industrialisation of war – an example of how research provides content which contributes to the storyline and character development.

  A preserved trench.

  Photography © Scarpa

  A report in the Times newspaper mentioned that life at the front could be ‘frightfully trying’. Looking at preserved trenches in Belgium, one realizes this is a massive understatement.

  The amount of advert
isements for domestic servants in the newspapers indicates the large numbers of girls who left these positions to join munitions work and is a marker for social change. As the war went on and the need for men became desperate, the rules regarding age and literacy were relaxed. Being illiterate makes one more vulnerable to the opinions of others – for example, this report on the first day of the 1916 Battle of the Somme does not detail how disastrous it was for the soldiers involved.

  This journal report on 1916 Battle of the Somme has glossed the reality.

  Photography by Theresa Breslin and reproduced with permission

  The grave of young soldier – the inspiration for the character of Alex.

  Photography © Scarpa

  Despite censorship, soldiers did ‘code’ their mail to let their families know where they were and what was happening. They describe daily life at the front and mention infestations of lice and rats, yet display a pervading sense of duty and loving feelings for their families. In the book the various characters write letters which reflect their thoughts and experiences.

  When researching the book on the battlefields of the Western Front I watched schoolchildren visiting the memorial sites which now occupy the land where the book is set. They pushed their poppies into the spaces between the stones of the Menin Gate and the little wooden crosses purchased in Ypres are crowded onto the grave of one of the youngest soldiers, aged 15 – their age.

  The Yser Canal was where the Canadian surgeon,

  John McCrae plaque and Dressing Station at Yser Canal.

  Photography © Scarpa

  John McCrae, worked and wrote his poem In Flanders Fields. Dressing stations were embedded in the banks of the Yser Canal, and still have the fitments for the steel doors where the stretcher-bearers sheltered during heavy bombardments